Untitled Robert Zemeckis Project Gets a 2018 Release Date

Well, you can forget about those meetings between Robert Zemeckis and Warner Bros. about The Flash leading anywhere anytime soon. The Back to the Future and Used Cars director’s next feature, which will star Steve Carell, is scheduled to come out November 21, 2018, and it ain’t called The Flash. Originally titled The Women of Marwen, the project is based on Jeff Malmberg‘s acclaimed 2010 documentary, Marwencol.

Below, learn more about the new Robert Zemeckis movie.

The drama will open in theaters the same day as Ralph Breaks the Internet: Wreck-It Ralph 2 and a week after the Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them sequel. Over four years ago, the project got started at Zemeckis’ Universal-based production company, ImageMovers. Then two years, Carell signed on to play Mark Hogancamp. The writer of Edward Scissorhands and director of Black Beauty, Caroline Thompson, co-wrote the script with Zemeckis.

After Hogancamp was viciously beaten by five men outside of a bar, he suffered from a brain-damaging coma. To recover his hand-eye coordination and to cope with the aftermath of the attack, he created a town in his backyard called “Marwencol,” a hugely impressive World War II-era town. The dolls in the town represent his friends and family. After some of Hogancamp’s striking photographs of Marwencol had been discovered, he was offered the chance to have them displayed at an art gallery in New York.

Zemeckis told Cinemablend last year that after he discovered the documentary, he knew right away he wanted to tell Hogancamp’s story. Not the first time The Walk director has been inspired by a doc:

I’m going to be doing a movie with Steve Carell called The Women of Marwen… It’s based on this documentary called Marwencol. I wrote it, and it’s a much more… it’s a movie. It takes the essence of it, and then just blows it out. It’s action packed!.. I was surfing through [the channels] and I landed on PBS, and I came in in the middle of this documentary, and I literally stood up in the room, and I said, ‘I have to make the movie version of this.’

This story told through Zemeckis’ eye, “blown out” and “action packed,” could be something, especially if there’s enough humanity and truth to go with the spectacle, which isn’t always the case with Zemeckis. His last film, however, Allied, hit that sweet spot and made for one suspenseful drama. While some of the director’s fans might prefer it if he returned to large-scale filmmaking like The Flash, I’m happy he’s continuing to make the kind of pricey dramas we don’t see enough these days.